A Quote by Petra Collins

As a young woman, I was disturbed by the fact that there was no imagery that truly expressed the experience of a young woman and the challenges and turbulence we go through. All we had were teenage magazines like 'Cosmopolitan,' which are very one-sided and show an objectified view of women.
Maybe a young woman will go see a show by a woman, or starring a woman about women's issues, and that will help her get to that quiet place inside of herself where she can then explore what it means to be a woman to her.
It just struck me as really odd that there were all of these conversations going on about what young women were up to. Were young women having too much sex? Were young women politically apathetic? Are young women socially engaged or not? And whenever these conversations were happening, they were mostly happening by older women and by older feminists. And maybe there would be a younger woman quoted every once in a while, but we weren't really a central part of that conversation. We weren't really being allowed to speak on our own behalf.
When I look in the mirror I see the woman I knew I wanted to be as a child. When I was a young girl, I had a vision of the woman I wanted to be. And I often reached out to women of color in America for inspiration. My mother would regularly buy Essence and Ebony. I would look at those magazines filled with images of professional, intelligent women of color who knew who they were, who enjoyed who they were, and who were surrounded by other people who enjoyed who they were. When I look in the mirror, I'm really glad that that's what I see today, but it took awhile to get here.
The things a young woman goes through between the ages of 18 and 20 are far different than what a young woman can go through between 20 and 22.
Yes. I was the first female colonel. I enjoyed being that kind of role model for young women watching the show. A woman can be a colonel! A woman can be in charge! Those were new ideas then.
I did an internship with Dove when they were doing the 'real beauty' campaign, and I was really inspired by that. Growing up in L.A., being a young woman, and seeing how the media tells young women to be everything you're not, I kind of wrote about that experience.
Shows like 'Sex and the City' got women involved again in a political way. They were drawn into the personal stories of the four women who together make up one complete cosmopolitan woman. We want to have community, and the show filled that void in our lives: friendship between women.
I specially want to have young women not to wait as I did until my children were grown, but young women to come in to gain their seniority so they could be respected leaders at a much earlier age. It's important for all women to see young women who share their experience whether it's as a working mom with young children, who understands the struggle and the aspirations of young women in a similar situation. And if they don't have family and they're pursuing their career women should see that as well.
People like [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor], whether young people, young women, even critics - male critics - they were not shocked by it. Of course, some parts were cut.
I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and restless, romantic aspirations
I think anorexia is a metaphor. It is a young woman's statement that she will become what the culture asks of its women, which is that they be thin and nonthreatening. Anorexia signifies that a young woman is so delicate that, like the women of China with their tiny broken feet, she needs a man to shelter and protect her from a world she cannot handle. Anorexic women signal with their bodies "I will take up only a small amount of space. I won't get in the way." They signal "I won't be intimidating or threatening." (Who is afraid of a seventy-pound adult?)
What happens is young girls see images of women being objectified, and the more the woman becomes an object the more followers and likes she has - they see that as a role model and try to imitate these women, but they're not old enough to know what they're doing.
The fact is that men need women more than women need men; and so, aware of this fact, man has sought to keep woman dependent upon him economically as the only method open to him of making himself necessary to her. Since in the beginning woman would not become his willing slave, he has wrought through the centuries a society in which woman must serve him if she is to survive.
I spoke at a woman's club in Philadelphia yesterday and a young lady said to me afterwards, "Well, that sounds very nice, but don't you think it is better to be the power behind the throne?" I answered that I had not had much experience with thrones, but a woman who has been on a throne, and who is now behind it, seems to prefer to be on the throne.
The young women who attract so much attention never change: They are all stupid. They have at best only the crudest notions of their own power, and never calculate motives or consequences. Giving a young woman a young woman's body makes as much sense as giving ten teenagers Lamborghinis and telling them to drive in figure 8s around a parking lot.
I would ... go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting. ... Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. ... If there were woman all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be.
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